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@ghostoceanmagazine
National Poetry Month is a great time to dive into our latest (eighteenth!) issue, featuring poetry from Brian D. Morrison, Erin J. Mullikin, Doug Paul Case, Abigail Welhouse, A.E. Talbot, and David Antonio Moody; flash prose from Amy Lipman; and reviews by Abigail Zimmer, C.J. Opperthauser, and J. Scott Brownlee!
We’ve got a new website with an integrated blog, so we’ll no longer be using this as our landing space. You can explore our catalog, learn more about who we are and our authors, and keep up on major news at the new website, but for more day-to-day updates (flash sales, what our authors are doing, photos from chapbook assembly, and other multimedia and chatter), like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.
Oh, and just so you know, our first chapbook of 2016 is now available for pre-order!
Our chapbook press has a new website, Facebook, and Twitter, so visit/like/follow us in all the new places!
More Advance Praise for ON THE OCCASION OF THE LAST OLD CAMP MEETING IN LLANO COUNTY
”There is a kind of uncanniness which binds the poems in On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County together. This uncanniness is so loud that the world suddenly ceases, and the only things moving are Brownlee’s lines. They often feel disconcerting at first because they seek to challenge conventional knowledge, insisting that “the world so loved the world it gave itself to itself.“ Igniting a fusillade of violence and beauty, Brownlee’s poems provide an indispensable understanding of what makes us vulnerable, and damned, and distinctly human.”
—D.M. Aderibigbe, the author of IN PRAISE OF OUR ABSENT FATHER
Ghost Ocean contributor J. Scott Brownlee gets some love for his forthcoming Tree Light Books chapbook!
Ghost Ocean’s 2015 Pushcart Prize Nominations
Join us in congratulating and crossing fingers for our 2015 Pushcart Prize nominees!
Abigail Zimmer – “In sleep I remembered” Abigail Zimmer – “The Last Place I Look” Ting Gou – “Family Hidden in Landscape” Ting Gou – “Snow White explains to the huntsman the material of his prison” Gabrielle Faith Williams – “Sleep Patterns” Evan Kleekamp – “Coin”
Ghost Ocean 17!
Our seventeenth issue is live, featuring stunning poems from Abigail Zimmer, Tony Mancus, Ting Gou, Amy Jo Trier-Walker, Evan Kleekamp, Adam Day, and Dorothy Chan, plus an interview with poet and collage artist Joshua Ware and a review by Anthony Marvullo!
Enjoy!
2015 Best of the Net Nominations
Congratulations and best of luck to our 2015 Best of the Net nominees!
Poetry Jennifer Hanks - “Oracle” (GO 16) Gabrielle Faith Williams - “Sleep Patterns” (GO 16) Matt Petronzio - “It Will Come Semi-Automatically” (GO 15) Dorothy Knight - “There is Love that Throws You Through a Plate Glass Window and Then There is Love” (GO 15) Jaime Zuckerman - “Sabine Equation” (GO 15) Joshua Young - “Field Notes Entry” (GO 15)
Fiction Joshua R. Helms - “Rocks” (GO 15) Casey Hannan - “Bad Math” (GO 16)
Non-fiction Samantha Schaefer - “Hand to Mouth” (GO 15)
New Digs
It’s your hair! No, the glasses--they’re new glasses, right? Have you lost weight? Been working out? New shoes?
Don’t waste your time with the guessing game. From head to toe, we’ve got a brand new look. Go peek, you know you want to.
2015 Chapbook Contest Results Announced!
The results are in, folks!
Winner
J. Scott Brownlee, On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County
Finalists
Abigail Zimmer, child in a winter house brightening
C.J. Opperthauser, Cloud the Shape of Bedroom
Tasha Cotter, Girl in the Cave
Duncan Campbell, Joysong Demarcation
Hearty congratulations to J. Scott Brownlee, whose manuscript On the Occasion of the Last Old Camp Meeting in Llano County we’ll be publishing later this year!
The pool of entrants was stacked, and we’re thrilled to be publishing not only the winning manuscript, but also each of our finalists’ manuscripts.
A huge thanks for everyone who participated and supported the press, and congrats to these five fine writers who we’re so thrilled to be publishing in the future!
Our press, Tree Light Books, will be publishing chapbooks by J. Scott Brownlee, Abigail Zimmer, C.J. Opperthauser, Tasha Cotter, and Duncan Campbell! Congrats poets and congrats Tree Light!
Happy Birthday/Bookday!
Ghost Ocean contributor and Tree Light Books author Rachel Levy’s birthday is today, so why not grab her book A Book So Red, newly out from Caketrain. You can purchase the book here. In the mood for a throwback, too? You can purchase a PDF of Rachel’s chapbook Necessary Objects from Tree Light here.
Ghost Ocean contributor J. Scott Brownlee’s birthday is also today, and you can preorder his book Requim for Used Ignition Cap here. Want a taste of his poetry first? You can read his lovely poem “Organ Solo with Oblivion and Gar” in Ghost Ocean 12.
An online journal of very short fictions -- under 1000 words.
For the second year in a row, we’ve had prose selected in The Longlist for Wigleaf’s Top 50. Last year, it was Shawn Delgado’s “Start to Finish” (Ghost Ocean 13). This year we’re excited to see Courtney Flerlage's "My Best Friend Cassie Is Turning Into a Bird" (Ghost Ocean 14) included.
Thanks, Wigleaf!
Chapbook Contest Ends Tonight!
Today’s the last day to submit your manuscripts to our chapbook contest!
Winner receives publication in the form of beautiful, handmade books edited, designed, and printed by Tree Light Books, a Pushcart Prize winning press, as well as one-tenth of the book’s print run in author copies (ex: We print 100, you get 10 on the house.), discounts on future copies and all TLB titles, free digital copies of sold out titles, and $75 prize money.
Submit here. Don’t have a manuscript ready? Tell your friends!
Send our print counterpart your best damn chapbook manuscripts by midnight, won’t you?
I come from a family of birds who begged for the bullet and took it themselves. Sometimes I worry their songs pitch through my veins like ruby- throated warblers.
Matt Petronzio, “It Will Come Semi-Automatically,” published in Ghost Ocean (via bostonpoetryslam)
so you’ve lost interest in politeness i too have lost sight of important things & the whole evening has become a series of spoilers for every summer block buster worth seeing
Joshua Young, “The Past Keeps Prying at the Corners of this Narrative like a Couple of Crowbars Making Love to a Doorframe,” published in Ghost Ocean (via bostonpoetryslam)
John Andrews slays it in "Soft Mouth," Casey Hannan will make your skin crawl in "The Math is Bad," Jennifer Hanks leaves you with the taste of licorice and wolf skull in "Oracle," Dalton Day will have you dreaming of crows or crumbs in "The Same Tree," Emily Wilson fragments our hearts apart in "(cold light)," Gabrielle Faith Williams looks into a girl and sees a gun in "Sleep Patterns," Kyle Beachy's "The Beginning of Remembrance" will make you suspicious of your siblings, and C.J. Opperthauser's review of Mathias Svalina's WASTOID will get you wasted on passionate criticism.
It's Ghost Ocean 16 for your otherwise lackluster Monday!
Review: Wastoid
Wastoid by Mathias Svalina. Washington, DC: Big Lucks Books, November 2014. 166 pages. $14.00 paperback.
Mathias Svalina’s Wastoid is a new animal we all need to marvel at. It’s a long storm of beautiful fairytale nonsense and wonder. It’s all about love and it is love. It’s frustrating to categorize a book like this and I usually try to avoid it. Instead I opt for a description fed by the book’s attitude and aesthetics and hope that the reader will color the book’s genre as they see fit. I so badly want to make a list of everything that’s present and shining in Wastoid; allow me, at least, to try.
Poetry is rooted in love. It circles around the lyricism of love (how moonlight changes the pigment of his/her hair et al.) and requires a love of words. Still, Svalina’s book really does deliver a new framework and color of love, a fresh shade and relieving sigh. In a fantasy world where anything goes, where fairytales are brief and hilarious and perfectly descriptive of the maddening deepness and indescribability of true love, Svalina gives a continuing nod to the Surrealist poets through wondrous images and objects, but in an entirely reinterpreted way.
The first time I met my lover he was a praying mantis. He extended one long green leg toward me & offered me his iPod. I inserted them into my ears & heard a sound I could not identify. It sounded like two wet bones rubbing against each other, but also like lakewater lapping off a handful of wet hair. Then I understood the sound. I was inside my lover’s heart & the sound was his blood, how a glass of cold water on a hot day undoes itself.
From that very first page, the expectations for what short prose-block poems about love might be are hacked at the knees and shown a new child. The surreal world Svalina points us to is magical and insane and therefore indicative of love; Svalina recreates that freefall love feeling where things blur past and nothing is certain but everything is of another world, a new world. At the same time, Svalina doesn’t let this world of love become too serious and stone-faced, letting his surrealisms explore how ridiculous these moments might get.
I arrive each morning to the sun smiling that smile that’s like, Dude, seriously: jaeger-bombs. And the sun says Sup? And I’m like, You know.
While humor can be an engine, it doesn’t necessarily flesh out the entire body. Svalina is careful to blend goofiness with beauty. In the very same poem, a few lines later:
And then even the dirt is gone & the sun & I are suspended & the generator’s snarl sounds like blood. … I think I liked love better when he was a synonym for blood.
Love is never a singular object and nothing is a singular object in Wastoid. While there’s often an immense distance between the two loving figures, we get moments where love can connect two points we never really ascribed a distance to.
I fell in love with my sight. My sight may grant a thousand errors but each proves his presence. On nights when all I can do is stand beside a friend as he talks to someone else & then move on to stand beside another friend and so on, I reach my hand below my eyes & my sight holds me & there is nothing that cannot be downloaded somewhere.
In this passage one of the senses connects the speaker intimately with another of the senses. Love transcends not just distance, but perceived boundaries of identity and sentience. Yet, again, Svalina’s moonlit-sort-of magic is struck down and set into place with a quick turn in “downloaded” — a modern reference which means, again, distance and connectivity muddy things even further.
Elsewhere in the book an actor falls in love with his own photograph, and the speaker’s lover, an ever-changing passive character, has bear’s genitals. The lover moves into the speaker’s eyes. The lover rents the speaker’s love by the hour. The lover is the Fourth Crusade. A man falls in love with a bomb strapped to another man’s chest and with each of these we are forced to reconsider what sort of connection love really is and where it can operate. Lovers are never obvious and Svalina is certainly never obvious.
I’ve made a list of Svalina’s scenes that I love—they are indicative of the book’s power. Of course there are so many worlds in this Wastoid that we’d need eight types of telescopes and some new elements to really show and feel them all, but this list is a good surreal skim. I’m in love with each page. I’m in love with them on my laptop screen.
Going to AWP in Minneapolis? So are we! We’ll be shacked up with The Lettered Streets Press and Plays Inverse at bookfair table 1630. Drop by to chat with editors and authors, purchase discounted titles from our catalog, and grab swag for your growing collection. Have questions about our current chapbook contest? We’ll be happy to answer them!
Thursday night at The Nicollet Diner we’ll be teaming up with our AWP tablemates for a night of readings from stellar writers including Tree Light authors Alexander York (The Vanity House), Tony Mancus (Bye Sea), and Pedro Ponce (Stories After Goya). The festivities begin at 7:30; you can read more about the event and RSVP here.
Excited to show off our chapbooks and our authors and see your lovely faces again. Hope to catch you in Minneapolis, folks!
We’re pumped for AWP Minneapolis, where we’ll be handing out swag and representing the mag and our press, Tree Light Books, at table 1630!
Tree Light is co-hosting a reading Thursday night with plenty of familiar Ghost Ocean faces--Joshua Young, Robbie Wendeborn, Alexander York, Tony Mancus, and Pedro Ponce--as well as Jennifer Hanks, whose poem “Oracle” is forthcoming in the almost-almost-here Ghost Ocean 16!
Come say hi at the bookfair, listen to some Ghost Ocean greats on Thursday night, and save the How am I going to fit all this shit in my carry-on?! for Sunday morning.
See you there, folks!
“Hold the right fig to your ear / and you can hear the universe,” Ting Gou writes in “The Fig Wasp.”
Her stunning poem “The Fig Wasp” (from Ghost Ocean 13) is one of several outstanding poems featured in Sundress’s 2014 Best of the Net Anthology. Dive in, and for a moment at least, it won’t feel like Monday.
